Sound Search #7: Tim Waine, HumanCulture

The first social media report Tim Waine and his co-founder Tom Macdonald delivered ran to 45 pages. It covered more than 900 of Defected's Instagram posts, and the label's GM took one look and asked whether he was really expected to read all of it. He did, and it worked. That hand-built analysis has since become HumanCulture, a platform that shows artists and their teams what their audience responds to and predicts how a post will perform before it goes live.

Tim has spent more than fifteen years in music and entertainment. He started in licensing at Defected Records and moved into sync, landing the label's first big commercial placement. He then worked on brand partnerships at a US product placement and influencer agency and ran Independent Culture, his own agency connecting brands with independent music, before co-founding HumanCulture.

We talked to Tim about what pairing artists with brands taught him, and why musicians shouldn't have to become social media experts to be heard.

You've spent much of your career pairing artists with brands. How do you actually judge the fit?

It starts with the brief, and it's wild how vague a brand can be. I've had briefs that amount to: we want a rapper whose core demographic is 18 to 25, with a million-plus followers. Hundreds of people fit that. You need more context.

If you're doing the job right, you dig in. Who is the brand, what are they trying to explore, and what do they ultimately want to achieve? Then you go and find the right person, or people.

A lot of it comes down to knocking on the right doors. If you keep working with the same partners, you end up pitching the same names, and they're not necessarily the right fit. It's the same in sync: the best music supervision agencies are well connected right across the board, so they find the thing nobody has thought of yet, at a label or publisher nobody has tapped. That's where the gold lies.

Then you have to present it so the brand believes in the story and sees your vision. So it comes down to two things: as much detail on the brief as you can get, and being in the right rooms. The second only comes with time and trust, once people want to talk to you and you've done a few partnerships together.

What do artist teams most often get wrong when they pitch to a brand?

Artists and their management pitch for commercial opportunities without thinking about the bigger picture. They treat it purely as money rather than as a long-term value play.

I'm thinking of developing artists here. Earlier in your career, a £5,000 or £10,000 paycheck can mean a huge amount, and I understand that. But you also have to think about what the brand can do for you.

When I ran my agency, we put together a multi-artist partnership with a big whiskey brand moving into hustle culture, where rap was a big part of the sound. One manager in particular got it. They didn't try to squeeze a multibillion-dollar brand. Their attitude was: this brand is huge globally, so we'll do it for a relatively small fee because of what they'll do for us and how they'll talk about it.

So artists underestimate what the right partnership can do for them. Where do brands go wrong?

No disrespect to brands, because some do amazing things. But more often than not, especially at the bigger ones, there's so much red tape. There are a lot of decision makers and a lot of guidelines, and that makes for a really restrictive creative environment. The creator, whether a musician or anyone else, ends up delivering something they don't feel comfortable with.

Before HumanCulture, I worked at a creative agency on a campaign for a huge global brand with a group of YouTube creators in their early twenties. Their content was comedic and fairly silly. The brand wanted them to sell a product aimed at Gen Z, men especially.

The creative ended up compromised, because the brand couldn't get on board with who the talent were or with their idea for the campaign. It was constant back and forth. The talent said, "We don't like what you're coming up with. This is how we'd do it in our style." The brand said, "That doesn't work for us. We won't get a sign-off." It was a square peg in a round hole, but there was a deadline, so we shot the content.

When it came out, the creators' fans called it out: "This is just an advert. This isn't who you guys are." The sentiment was negative right from the start after a significant investment.

The talent has to meet the brand partway. But you chose that talent because you like what they already make. Let them make it well, because that's where you'll get the most success. That's how it feels organic and authentic. Otherwise it feels like an advert.

It's like brands arriving on Facebook around 2008 and treating it as one more press release channel. The winners were willing to bend their own guidelines, which is hard for a big corporation. Where did that project leave you?

That project, how difficult it was and how badly it performed, was the catalyst for HumanCulture. If the brand had understood, in a much more qualitative way, why those creators' content worked, they might have come up with a better creative. So we asked: can we dissect what creators deliver visually, how they write, and how their audience responds? Can we find the patterns, so the decision is backed by data? That makes it much easier for brands to get on board.

The very first version of HumanCulture was qualitative analysis for brands, to help them choose the creators they work with, and vice versa. Then Tom and I started knocking heads about where it could go. If we were doing this for brands, why not for creators? There are far more creators than brands. That's where the scale is.

So we pivoted to talent. Maybe one day we'll bring brands into HumanCulture, but for now it's about helping talent understand their content: what we can learn from the visual, the caption and the way they put themselves out there. That was the light bulb moment.

Ten or fifteen years ago, musicians could keep the music and the marketing more separate. Now social is one of the biggest discovery engines for new artists, and a second job on top of the music. How much of HumanCulture is about lifting that weight?

Musicians are musicians, first and foremost. That's what they're really good at. Generally speaking, they're not social media experts or content creators, and that's not the world they set out to walk into. We've worked with some amazing musicians who love doing social and enjoy the creative challenge. But a lot of them are frustrated.

We want to ease that frustration: hold their hand, guide them, help them come up with ideas and create. We help them test content before they publish it, so they're not hitting Return and hoping, then feeling disappointed after spending hours on something that didn't land.

There's no silver bullet for social media content; I'm very confident of that. What we've built is a strategic hand that gets you there faster and with less stress. Some things you, or even our system, expect to do well won't. That's okay. The algorithm won't always go your way. But over time the patterns build, our models improve, the strategy improves, and so do the results.

Predicting how a post will perform before it goes live is a big part of what sets HumanCulture apart. How does the Content Testing Hub work?

It's what people ask about most. The idea came mid-build. Tom and I were looking at one artist's data and realized how much was there. Tools like Influencer Intelligence or Chartmetric give you traditional quantitative metrics. Suddenly we also had all this textual and visual data. We wondered whether AI could look at a live post and work out how well it had performed.

We started playing with it. It was very primitive, but because of the data we'd captured and how we'd consolidated it, the results were insanely accurate.

Here's how it works. You upload a video or image, choose Instagram or TikTok, and add the caption you're considering. We look for every pattern in the visuals and text you're about to publish and run our models against them, alongside the historical data we've already collected. A lot happens in the back end, and what comes out is a Publish Readiness Score. It works like a school grade, A to E, so you know whether a post is likely to beat or fall short of your usual engagement, reach, likes, shares or views.

People find all kinds of uses for it. One of the majors, which I won't name, plugged their videographer in. On a shoot, they can upload content and see how it's likely to perform. If they need to reshoot, or try a different angle or setting that will resonate more with the audience, they still have the time and resources there on the day.

The pain point behind all of this was A/B testing in public. Why are we still doing that? It's an insane way of going about things. We have all this data, so why not a private environment to test against what is essentially a live audience? We ingest data every 24 hours for every connected account, whether that's one like or a hundred posts, so you're always testing against a current dataset. You don't need to post something to find out. You can test it first and then decide whether to go live.

A more philosophical question. If I test my content against what has already worked, do I risk making variations of the same thing? Where's the room to experiment?

It's a really good question. We never want to stifle creativity. If you have a good idea that's completely outside your usual creative box, go and do it. Don't be bound by data or by what AI tells you.

We always use the example of the old Cadbury Dairy Milk ad with someone in a gorilla suit playing the drums to Phil Collins. I'm pretty sure every Dairy Milk ad before it was luxurious, smooth, delicious chocolate, the usual. Then they did that. I still think about how different it was. Virality meant something else back then, but everyone was talking about it, in the playground and at the office.

If you have a good feeling about an idea, chances are it's a good idea, and that's when you'll be most passionate about it. So go and deliver it. HumanCulture is brilliant at helping people navigate the everyday. That's our main framework. But go forth and create.

The Content Testing Hub is just one use. For a really out-of-the-box idea, that's where Jasper, our AI creative strategist, comes in, because there are ways to warm your audience up. Musicians change creatively over their careers. We've all followed an artist who suddenly released something that sounded nothing like what we loved them for, and it took a while to come around to it. Often they could have warmed us up better.

Jasper knows who you are, so you can tell it: in six months my sound is going to be fundamentally different. How do I build a strategy that lands this softly, rather than an aggressive "look at me, I'm very different now"? Some artists will want the sudden change so they stand out. Others will want a more gradual path.

Since launching HumanCulture, what's one thing you see artists doing on social that they should stop?

Honestly, and I'm not dodging the question, every artist is fundamentally different. One of the exciting things about HumanCulture is that there's no clear "everyone should do this" moment. We see some trends, but the diagnosis varies a lot from one artist to the next.

The one thing I'd say to anyone using HumanCulture or signing up an artist: don't be generic when you prompt something like Jasper. If you say, "I've got a release in eight weeks, create me a strategy," you'll get something that's already been done. Give it context, ideas and your own thinking about what you want to achieve, and you'll get a much stronger strategy than a replica of something else.

It's always about development. How can I grow faster with the tools I have? That's where I'd push people most. Dig in. Don't repeat what you've already done. Ask how to make it better, based on what you want to achieve.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Anyone can register at www.humanculture.com and explore a demo artist profile, with full access to the dashboards, Jasper and the Content Hub.

Sound Search is AIMS' interview series with music professionals on how technology is changing the way we discover and work with music.

Have someone in mind we should talk to? Reach out to us on LinkedIn.